Dyslexia can affect most aspects of study in higher education, and it is likely that students with dyslexia will encounter a number of the following barriers to learning:

General issues

Students may not have had a chance to learn or build the necessary study skills for higher education due to specific difficulties listed below. 

Learning and assessment will also create a higher degree of stress and anxiety for dyslexic students.

Students may lack self-confidence and experience low self-esteem as a result of their impairments and their past experiences in education.

Social interaction with peers can be affected as a result of these issues and those listed below.

Reading

Difficulty locating books and reference material in the library.

Slow reading speed.

Difficulty with scanning text to extract key information.

Weak working memory and concentration and a subsequent need to reread passages several times to achieve comprehension.

Difficulty with tracking resulting in skipping over or repeat-reading words and/or whole lines of text. Subsequent difficulty with comprehension. 

Potential co-occurrence of visual stress can exacerbate difficulties.

Reading can be extremely fatiguing for all of these reasons.

Lectures and note-taking

Difficulty with processing sounds and hence with comprehending lectures.

Difficulties with concentration and information processing leading to a lack of understanding.

Difficulty with simultaneously listening and writing/typing.

Difficulty/slowness with handwriting and subsequent discomfort or fatigue over longer periods.

Handwriting becoming illegible when under pressure.

Poor short term memory resulting in difficulties with copying information from board/projector.

All of the above factors can result in an inability to create useful notes, or to take notes at all.

Course work and assignments

Researching assignment topics extremely time-consuming as a result of reading issues mentioned above.

Difficulties with lower-order writing skills like spelling, grammar and punctuation.

Difficulties with planning and structuring work and organising information (often as a result of attention that must be given to lower-order skills).

Difficulty with expressing knowledge of a topic coherently.

Lack of fluency in written work. Sentences may be tangential or circuitous.Text may contain omissions and repetitions.

Difficulty in proofreading work for errors due to the abovementioned reading issues.

During presentations, may struggle with reading aloud and with memory and concentration.

Concomitant difficulties with organisation and time management resulting in missed deadlines.

Many of the difficulties mentioned above will make participation in group work challenging and stressful. In addition, dyslexic students may experience secondary issues with confidence and self-esteem in group situations as a result of primary barriers to learning.

Mathematics

Difficulties understanding the (often complex) language of maths.

Decoding written elements of problems will be affected by the abovementioned reading issues.

Perseveration (looking back over previous work to check methods and mistakenly recording the previous answer as the solution to the current problem).

Misinterpretation or confusion of mathematical symbols and misplacement of decimal points.

Difficulty extracting information from diagrams, charts, graphs etc.

Difficulties with information processing and calculation.

Weak working memory and concentration leading to confusion during complex calculations involving multiple stages.

Difficulties with accurate recording of data and accurate presentation of calculations.

Exams

Revision will be affected by the above-mentioned reading, memory, concentration, planning, organisation and time management issues.

Difficulties with memory and concentration impact on exam performance.

Reading and comprehending exam questions takes much longer as a result of the abovementioned reading difficulties.

All issues with planning and structuring of coursework also apply to exam answers.

Difficulty/slowness with handwriting and subsequent discomfort or fatigue over longer periods.

Handwriting becomes illegible when under pressure.

Spelling and grammatical errors and proofreading issues mentioned in relation to coursework will be heightened in an exam situation due to time pressure and exam anxiety.